Interlude
by LondonBelow
Summary: 1973. While Charles takes a moment to collect his thoughts, Hank has a few questions for Logan. [Stars from Home]
A note - I started Stars From Home just a bit after First Class, so well before Days of Future Past, but the question did arise of where my series fit with DoFP. Thus.

* * *

1973.

Paris hadn't been easy, Raven so close… and so unable to accept their help. Everyone felt it when they returned to the mansion, the heaviness, but no one showed it like Charles. There was no schism quite so strained in the entire world, just then—Charles as he had been, as he was, as he tried to be.

Not that it had been particularly easy for Hank, either, the number of people asking the same question Logan had: _what is that?_ If he hadn't been thrilled with Erik before, it was active dislike after leaving him all tied up in public with that damn metal fountain!

"Charles," Hank ventured. He had adopted an increasingly nervous tone over the past years, never quite at home in his own skin—or anywhere else—since the school closed. Now his tone was on edge even for him. "I heard what Logan said to you on the plane—"

"Not now, Hank."

It was progress, seeing him in the wheelchair again, but both Hank and Charles knew neither of them was fully okay. Hank was the same not-quite-okay he had been most of his life, but Charles lacked a familiar rut to fall into. No, Charles had always excelled, always been able not to make things work but to make them work better.

So he had hit rock bottom. He didn't know what else to do.

"But what about S—"

"It's a common name," Charles managed to turn each word into punctuation. End of conversation.

Hank nodded. "Yeah. I've known about six of them—I think there were two in my organic chem class—"

"You're overselling it," Charles muttered.

Although he was healing, he was still not the man he had once been. So while Charles spent a moment on his own to collect himself, Hank took a manila envelope off the top of a bookcase in his mess of a lab, then slipped a folder out of it. There was no point once Charles was walking again. Luckily he hadn't thought to look.

Folder in hand, Hank followed his nose to the kitchen, following unfortunately a rather unpleasant smell. (Apparently they didn't know about showers in the future.)

Logan sat at the kitchen table, attempting to eat an absolute abomination of a sandwich. Hank stopped trying to identify the ingredients after pickles, chips, and mustard. (They had mustard? From when?) Probably some weird future stuff…

Hank took a seat opposite him.

Logan raised an eyebrow in warning, a silent reminder that he would much rather be left alone.

Hank didn't budge.

"What is it, furball?"

He was not in furry form.

He didn't comment on that.

"I need to know if you recognize anyone in this picture."

Logan reached for it, hesitating when he caught Hank's glare at his hands. He wiped his fingers on his shirt, then took the snapshot out of Hank's hand. Hank watched in anticipation as Logan's expression went from blank, to squinting curious, to surprised.

 _Yes._

The realization shot through Hank like fireworks.

"Yeah," Logan said. He set the photo on the table and tapped it vaguely. "That's Scott and Storm. How can you have that?"

"Storm," Hank mused. "That suits Ororo."

The comment also relieved a fear he had been unwilling to admit, even to himself. When Logan listed the people who would matter in the future, he only used one name Hank recognized—Scott. Even if it was their Scott, Ororo was still out there.

No, only using a different name. Her powers must have been much more within her control by then.

"How do you have this?" Logan insisted. "Where are they?" He glanced around like they might be hiding around any corner.

"Oh, no, they're not—they're gone," Hank explained. "They left."

In 1964, Hank built a camera just as a little side project. He had it for about a week before they lost Scott and Ororo and half the pictures turned out blurry. This was one of the better ones. You could see all of the faces.

Logan nodded at it. "Who's she?"

"Ruth."

Like that explained everything.

In the picture, the three of them sat on the steps outside, Ororo beside Ruth, Scott a few stairs down. Ruth had a hand on Scott's shoulder. He had a book in hand (Hank couldn't read the title, but Steinbeck was a safe bet) and Ororo was indicating her arm. It would look strange if you didn't know that was the summer she spent months in a cast.

He recalled perfectly the way they looked up at him, the way Ruth smiled, a sharp comment he knew was affectionate. He wasn't sure what else happened that day, though. What were they talking about? Was it the day Ororo had chucked a syrupy waffle at Alex's face? (Or did Hank just want an excuse to relive that day?) The day Alex made so many jokes while Scott pumped the tires on his bike? (Alex could make anything filthy, but it started with 'pump' in the description.) The day Ruth and Charles returned from their kid-free date?

Hank didn't know. There were so many small lost moments from that summer.

To Logan, he explained, "Ruth was Charles's girlfriend at the time."

"Huh. Where's he?" In the picture, that was.

"I'm not sure."

"So why didn't Charles tell me about this?"

Hank shook his head. Because, really, it was too hard, but he couldn't say that. He had watched what this absence did to Charles and while Charles was beginning to trust Logan, and grudgingly Hank trusted him too, this was personal.

"How well do you know them?" Hank asked.

Logan looked again at the picture. Given the heaviness in his expression, Hank knew that at least one of them was dead. He swallowed.

And if Charles had his powers…

"Ororo and I were close," Logan said. "Scott, uh…"

"I would've guessed that," Hank agreed.

She had always been more the one for posturing. He could imagine Ororo competing with Logan's aggressive assertions of masculinity. Of course, when Hank pictured this, he saw a coltish 14-year-old girl with her hair in fraying braids. He did not imagine an adult.

"Look, we weren't as close. There was a girl," Logan explained, defensive. More softly he added, "It was stupid," and bit off a mouthful of his disgusting sandwich.

 _A girl?_ Hank thought. Well, good for Scott! When Hank knew him, Scott could barely talk _about_ girls, let alone to one.

"Why didn't Charles tell me?" Logan asked, his mouth still half-full.

Hank added 'manners' to the mental list of things they didn't have in the future. (Okay, he had known that already, but he underlined it for the third time.)

He sighed. "It wasn't the school closing that broke him," he murmured. "That happened, um, it had been small. One of our students, Doug, ended up in Vietnam, and Alex re-enlisted, but this was after we lost Ororo and Scott."

He pushed the folder toward Logan.

Logan looked skeptically from the folder to Hank, then wiped his hands on his shirt again (not-in-future: napkins…) and opened it. He scanned the forms. Given the expression on his face, he hadn't known either of them very well, after all.

"His son."

Hank nodded.

"And she was…?"

"The foster care paperwork is in there, too. To make the serum, to cure his paralysis, I needed to use Scott's blood. Charles always struggled with it. The more he learned about what happened in Omaha…"

"What happened in Omaha?"

Hank hesitated. "How well did you say you knew them?"

"I knew Ororo well. Where are they?"

"They left."

"Where?"

"We don't know. One morning, they just—there was a, a spaceship—"

Logan scoffed. "Right."

"It's true," Hank insisted. "They left, on a spaceship, with Scott's biological father."

"Bullshit."

"Oh, I'm sorry, when you traveled through time from the future where Charles and Erik are still on speaking terms, did you do a comprehensive study of the history of UFO sightings in Westchester?"

Logan just scoffed, which Hank took as an acknowledgment that he had no actual arguments.

"Of course not, or you would have known about what happened in 1964. I know they're gone and I've watched how badly it destroyed him. Charles has been low before, but not this bad. Logan… you and I… we can't bring him back."

"I'm here to—"

"You're here to fix one thing, I know, but you came here because you needed Charles, not because you wanted to help him. That's going to be you now, someone who's always here?"

"I'm gonna try!"

"You're not—" Hank began, raising his voice, then he glanced at the doorway and lowered it. They didn't want this overheard. He shouldn't be saying it at all, really. "They're his children, Logan. They needed him. You need his help and he's better, but it's not the same."

"Look, I'm doing the best I can here. He's using his powers. He's getting better."

Hank hesitated. "Charles… thinks he's through and through a scientist. So did I, for a long time, until I saw something I couldn't explain. After he lost his legs, Charles was depressed. He was constantly drunk. I was the top of my field and a graduate of Harvard."

All the education in the world didn't each him how to help Charles. No, that came from an eighth grader who innately knew.

"I couldn't help. You're doing better now than I did then, but you're not Scott."

"Usually people tell me that as a compliment," Logan said.

"I guess you hang around with the wrong people."

Logan glanced at him, then looked at the file again. There were papers, Ororo's foster placement and Scott's adoption, accreditation for the school… and there were pictures, though only a few.

"What happened?"

"After a while, Charles and Ruth started arguing. The more they fought, the less they believed the kids were coming back. She had… she'd lost a child before. He hadn't. I don't know who took it harder, but it destroyed them both."

Logan nodded like he understood. Hank supposed that anyone who had seen a parent and child would understand. It was an unnatural bond to break.

It wasn't easy to remember, either. Hank hadn't lost the way Charles did, but he lost two people who were important to him.

He tapped the picture again.

"Ororo controls the weather. She grew up in Cairo. She's clever, sometimes a little too sharp. Scott can shoot concussive blasts out of his eyes, he uses ruby quartz lenses to control it. He reads all the time, especially Steinbeck."

"They were different when I knew them, they were adults."

"But it was them?" Hank glanced at the door again. Charles couldn't even bear to look at the papers, he certainly couldn't hear this discussion. "I need to know that they come back."

Logan nodded. "Yeah," he said. "They'll come back."

"Not Erik."

Logan and Hank turned to the doorway, both surprised to see Charles there. Hank hastily retrieved the file, gathering the papers into it, the record of Ororo and Scott and the school that was. Hiding it away from the one person who could never forget.

"Not Erik," Charles concluded.

"No," Logan confirmed.

"Well… I do appreciate your waiting. If you're ready, we'll use Cerebro to find Raven."

"Are you ready?" Logan retorted.

Charles glanced at the folder, up to Hank's face, then back to Logan.

"We'll find out."


End file.
